Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Feasibility Study Of Transitioning From Thick Plates (0.250”) Mounted On 30-Point Pvc Carriers To Thinner Plate Technologies Mounted On Recyclable Foam And Pet (0.155”) For Post-Print Corrugated, Nathaniel J. Poole

All Theses

In the United States, the most common press configuration for brown-box printing is a 0.280” undercut press. These press configurations have long relied on thick 0.250” plates mounted on 0.030” PVC sheets to print onto corrugated substrates. Each year, around twenty million pounds of waste are produced by the printing industry, through paper waste, plate waste, among other materials. One large factor of that waste is flexographic plate waste, which either ends its life in a landfill or is repurposed into other products. This study establishes a comparison between traditionally used 0.250” plates on 30pt PVC versus 0.155” plates mounted …

Decision Making For Large-Scale Problems Under Uncertainty And Conflict, Benjamin J. Hamlin

All Dissertations

Large-scale decision-making problems appear in many areas including long-range forecasting such as energy generation forecasting. Many such problems are subject to conflicting objectives and uncertain data, and can be modeled as linear optimization problems. We study novel theoretical results and algorithms for large-scale linear decision problems under conflict and uncertainty. First, we propose a parametric Benders decomposition algorithm for solving large-scale linear optimization problems with multiple objectives or deterministically uncertain objectives. Second, we extend the parametric Benders decomposition to a multi-stage setting, developing a parametric stochastic dual dynamic programming algorithm, which enables decision-making when conflicts and uncertainty have planning impacts …

Optimal Allocation Of Flexible Servers In Healthcare Systems, Tong Zhang

All Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the optimization of worker allocation in healthcare systems, focusing on flexible staffing models and the strategic prioritization of healthcare tasks. This research explores the dynamics among pre-operative, operative, and post-operative care units under various cost and service-rate constraints, using a series of models that represent realistic healthcare scenarios within a comprehensive framework for improving patient flow and reducing waiting costs.

In Chapter 2, we model and analyze cross-trained nurse allocation policies within an inpatient surgical system. We model the surgical system as a tandem clearing queueing system and formulate Markov decision processes under different business rules governing …

The Iron Pyramid: Expanding The Iron Triangle To Integrate Safety As A Fundamental Dimension Of Construction Success, Laura Cooley

All Theses

For more than fifty years, construction project success has been judged by staying on schedule, remaining within budget, and completing the planned scope of work—an approach commonly known as the “Iron Triangle” (Barnes, Ph.D., 2006). While these measures are important, they do not capture the full range of factors that determine whether a project truly succeeds.

This study introduces the “Iron Pyramid” (Cooley, 2025), a model that expands the traditional framework by adding a fourth dimension: safety. Safety is understood not simply as regulatory compliance or the absence of injuries, but as a holistic construct encompassing project culture, leadership practices, …

Barriers To Modernizing Aviation Maintenance Technician Education To Meet Emerging Industry Needs, Durwa Chavan

All Theses

Modernizing aviation maintenance education is essential to keep pace with emerging technologies, including electric propulsion systems and advanced avionics. As aircraft systems become more digitized and interconnected, there is a growing demand for qualified technicians who can conduct advanced diagnostics and maintenance. However, training programs have not kept pace with these technological shifts, creating a gap between workforce preparation and industry needs.

Using a qualitative research approach, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with industry professionals, educators, and regulatory personnel to identify gaps in existing training programs and Airman Certification Standards (ACS). This study addresses the disconnect between current aviation maintenance …

Multi-Stage Stochastic Programming For Disaster Relief Logistics Under Forecast Uncertainty, Sudhan Bhattarai

All Dissertations

Hurricanes are among the most destructive annual disasters in the United States, presenting interdependent challenges for evacuation planning and relief-supply logistics. Coordinating evacuation and relief operations is crucial to ensure the timely and effective movement of at-risk populations and the delivery of essential supplies. This dissertation develops and evaluates three progressively advanced multi-stage stochastic programming (MSSP) frameworks that integrate evacuation and relief-item pre-positioning while explicitly accounting for uncertainty in hurricane forecasts.

Chapter 1 introduces a fully adaptive MSSP model for the integrated hurricane relief logistics and evacuation planning (IHRLEP) problem. The model simultaneously optimizes evacuation flows and inventory pre-positioning over …

Human Comfort Modeling, Measurement, And Improvement In Human–Robot Collaboration, Yuchen Yan

All Dissertations

A dissertation is proposed to explore human comfort in human-robot collaboration (HRC) through modeling, prediction, and enhancement methodologies. Human comfort is a crucial yet underexplored factor in HRC, directly influencing task efficiency, trust, and overall collaboration effectiveness. Understanding the influential factors, developing computational models, and refining methods to improve human comfort in HRC are essential steps toward advancing the field of collaborative robotics. To address these challenges, multiple studies have been conducted. A series of experimental studies were performed to investigate how robot motion-based parameters affect human comfort in HRC. These studies examined both analytical comfort modeling approaches and physiological …

Understanding The Elements Of Sterile Processing Workflow: Or, Sterilization And Personnel, Sayed Rezwanul Islam

All Dissertations

The Sterile Processing Department (SPD), also known as the Central Sterile Services Department (CSSD), is an essential part of hospitals and healthcare facilities and is responsible for ensuring the cleanliness, sterility, and proper functioning of medical instruments. Sterile processing departments (SPDs) are key drivers of productivity, effectiveness, safety, and infection control in hospitals. A well-designed SPD workflow can enhance patient safety, reduce operating room (OR) delays, and improve productivity. To understand the flow of sterile processing and interactions between the OR and SPD, process maps and task analyses were developed through direct observations of the basic SPD functions: decontamination, assembly, …

Data-Driven Stochastic Programming For Disaster Housing Logistics Planning, Sheng-Yin Chen

All Dissertations

This dissertation develops an integrated modeling and solution framework for direct temporary disaster housing logistics under demand uncertainty. The proposed framework addresses the problem from short-term, long-term, and computational perspectives. First, a two-stage chance-constrained stochastic programming (TSCC) model is developed for short-term housing logistic planning, with demand scenarios generated via a data-driven spatial regression model that captures the relationship between housing demand, hazard exposure, and socioeconomic factors. A case study based on Hurricane Ian demonstrates that the TSCC model outperforms deterministic and traditional scenario-based models in both solution quality and robustness. Second, to address long-term housing logistics planning, a multi-horizon …

Optimizing Park Locations While Considering Resident Behavior, Lu Liu

All Theses

Urban parks and green-spaces significantly enhance community well-being by improving physical health, mental wellness, and environmental quality. Given these extensive benefits, ensuring fair and widespread access to urban parks represents a critical priority in urban planning. Despite the advantages of parks, optimizing their location poses unique and complex challenges distinct from traditional facility location problems, such as those involving emergency services or schools. The core distinction arises from the decentralized nature of residents’ park selection behaviors. Unlike centralized allocations typically managed by public administrators, park usage decisions are driven by individual preferences and behaviors. This decentralized decision-making introduces two additional …

Effects Of Variation In Altitude And Temperature On The Restraining Force And Internal Gauge Pressure Of Constrained Dunnage Airbags, Charles R. Weaver

All Theses

Dunnage airbags are an increasingly popular choice for securing cargo. During transit, changes in ambient temperature and pressure can cause airbags to expand generating damaging horizontal compressive forces in the trailer or container. Previous studies have developed numerical models for the behavior of Kraft paper and woven polypropylene fabric dunnage airbags under standard conditions but do not account for the behavior of airbags under varied altitudes and temperatures. This study provides empirical data on the internal gauge pressure and restraining force dynamics of 4-ply Kraft, woven polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride airbags under simulated altitude and temperature conditions. Tensile testing characterizes …

Replacement Optimization For Offshore Wind Turbine Farms, Morteza Soltani

All Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with devising optimal replacement policies for offshore wind turbines with a focus on minimizing the costs associated with major component replacements and production losses due to downtime. Like their onshore counterparts, offshore wind turbines are subject to progressive degradation due to normal operations, as well as the influence of dynamic environmental conditions that influence their rate of degradation. Due to their proximity, wind farm turbines share common environmental conditions, as well as specialized maintenance resources. Their common exposure to the environment and need to share resources introduce both stochastic and economic dependence between the wind turbines. …

Advancing Life Cycle Assessment For Environmental Sustainability Of Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Composites (Cfrps)), Hao Chen

All Dissertations

Carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composites (CFRPs) have emerged as promising materials, particularly for lightweight applications, with the potential to reduce environmental impacts across multiple sectors, including automotive, aerospace, and renewable energy. However, fully realizing their sustainability potential requires a more comprehensive and context-specific understanding of their environmental performance throughout the entire life cycle—from raw material production to end-of-life management.

This dissertation advances life cycle assessment (LCA) practices for CFRPs by addressing key challenges across multiple phases of the CFRP life cycle. First, I conducted a critical review and meta-analysis of carbon fiber manufacturing, revealing substantial variability in reported data on energy …

Bilevel Network Interdiction Models For Human Trafficking Disruption, Daniel Bruno Lopes Da Silva

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, we study a series of bilevel network interdiction problems motivated by applications in human trafficking disruption. First, we consider a bilevel network interdiction problem where the follower aims to maximize the amount of flow from the source node to the sink node and the leader aims to minimize the number of arcs from a critical set that have positive flow on them in the solution obtained by the follower. This problem models the situation where an anti-trafficking agent wants to minimize the number of people affected by the trafficking operations whereas the trafficker wants to maximize trafficking …

Community Wastewater Treatment Resilience Assessment, Tristan Veal

All Theses

With the rising threat of climate change and cascading impacts from infrastructure failure there is a growing need to strengthen community resilience. Theoretical and practical resilience frameworks are available, but they vary in aim and scope; there is no standard tool to assess resilience. This research expands on the resilience matrix (RM) application methods of previous research completed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and Clemson University. That work focused on drinking water treatment systems and developed a few dozen specific indicators, or metrics, to quantify resilience. This research adds wastewater infrastructure with the aim of identifying …

Tradespace Exploration With Statistical Modeling Techniques And Immersive Visual Representation In Virtual Environments, Nikhil Raj

All Theses

Statistical modeling techniques combined with virtual reality (VR) visualization offer powerful new approaches to tradespace exploration in engineering design. The research presented addresses the challenge of analyzing and communicating insights from complex multidimensional datasets, particularly for autonomous ground vehicle systems.

Beginning with a review of statistical methods—including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and correlation analysis—the study examines their applications in tradespace exploration. Building on this foundation, three distinct visualization pathways connecting MATLAB data to virtual environments are developed and evaluated: VRML representation, STL conversion, and Blender integration. Each approach is assessed for its ability to maintain data …

Decomposition And Coordination For Multiobjective Optimization: A Framework And Methodology, Philip J. De Castro

All Dissertations

In this work, we consider finding Pareto efficient solutions for complex multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). Complex MOPs are unique in the literature because they have many more objective functions than is typically considered. In fact, such complex MOPs will have 30+ objective functions. This large problem size presents computational and coginitive difficulties. Computationally, standard techniques for solving MOPs are often ineffective and cognitively it is difficult for a decision maker (DM) to handle all of the information provided in such a large problem. To address these challenges, we develop a decomposition and coordination framework. This framework will allow us to …

Multistage Random Key Genetic Algortihm Optimization For Scheduling Flexible Flow Lines With Sequence Depenedent Setup Times, Aadithan Anbuvanan

All Theses

This thesis proposes a new variation to the Random Key Genetic Algorithm (RKGA) for scheduling optimization in flexible flow line manufacturing with sequence dependent setup times. The proposed RKGA representation decodes scheduling information independently at each stage, unlike the traditional RKGA, which is only sequenced based on the first stage, limiting flexibility. The proposed method's performance is compared to the traditional method with varying numbers of jobs and stages. It is compared regarding performance ratio and statistical significance of differences through the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. Results show that the proposed RKGA outperformed traditional RKGA in high complexity (8 Stage …

Decision Space Decomposition For Multiobjective Programs, Emma Soriano

All Dissertations

Being inspired by the parametric decomposition theorem for multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) of Cuenca and Miguel (2017), and by the block- coordinate descent for single objective optimization problems, we present a decom- position theorem for computing the set of minimal elements of a partially ordered set. This set is decomposed into subsets whose minimal elements are used to retrieve the overall minimal elements. We apply this approach to strictly convex MOPs de- composing their decision space into lines. The line decomposition benefits from the fact that a multiobjective line search problem is equivalent to solving a collection of single objective …

Model Reference Adaptive Control For Mobile Manipulators And Beyond, Srivatsan Srinivasan

All Dissertations

In recent years, robotics has expanded into various sectors, including manufacturing, transportation, and household services, making the integration of autonomy a critical area of research. This shift aims to ensure safety and enhance the utility of autonomous systems. Traditionally, robotic applications focused separately on mobility, like automated guided vehicles, and manipulation, such as serial-chain arms in manufacturing. Today, however, we see a merging of these capabilities in the growing field of mobile manipulator robots that combine movement with purposeful interactive functionalities.

A typical mobile manipulator is a robotic arm mounted on a wheeled base. This thesis focuses on advancing control …

Computational Representation, Analysis And Verification Of Requirements In Engineering Design And Systems Engineering, Chandan Kumar Sahu

All Dissertations

Systems are developed to satisfy a set of requirements derived from stakeholders’ needs, defining the problem space for which the system is created as a feasible solution. The system design process begins with eliciting these requirements and concludes with validating whether the created system meets them. Requirements engineering (RE) encompasses elicitation, representation, analysis, documentation, verification, and validation. However, challenges in RE, such as imprecision in natural language (NL), proprietary restrictions, and a lack of standardized quality metrics, hinder the creation of well-formed and comprehensive requirements. These challenges complicate formalization and analysis of requirements.

This dissertation addresses these challenges by proposing …

Exploring Healthcare Chatbot Information Presentation: Applying Hierarchical Bayesian Regression And Inductive Thematic Analysis In A Mixed Methods Study, Samuel Nelson Koscelny

All Theses

High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, significantly increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, which are leading causes of death in the United States. While contributing to over 691,000 deaths in 2021 alone in the United States (U.S.), it also imposes immense economic burden on the healthcare system, costing approximately $131 billion annually. One way to address this issue is for increased self-care behaviors and medication adherence, both of which require sufficient health literacy. Despite the importance of health literacy, 90% of U.S. adults struggle with health-related subjects. Overcoming the issues associated with health literacy requires addressing the …

Identification And Validation Of A Measurement Of Emergency Physician Workload During End Of Shift Patient Handoffs, Steven Foster

All Dissertations

Recent increases in emergency physician (EP) workload have been identified as contributors to increased EP burnout, increased staff attrition, decreased patient safety, and increased patient admission rates. Patient handoffs have been extensively researched as critical points in patient care, with existing research primarily focusing on communication errors and interventions designed to standardize handoff communication protocols.

While end of shift handoffs in hospital emergency departments (EDs) intuitively represent a transfer of patient caseload from an outgoing EP to an incoming EP, there is a fundamental lack of literature examining how such handoffs contribute to EP workload, and a similar lack of …

Understanding The Challenges To Robotic-Assisted Surgery Adoption From The Perspectives Of The Human-Robot Interaction, Built Environment, And Training, Patrick A. Fuller

All Theses

Introduction: Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) is a form of minimally invasive surgery that is increasing in both its adoption and development due to many perceived advantages such as tremor reduction and motion scaling. However, RAS is still relatively new and there are a variety of novel barriers and challenges to the adoption of these platforms. Objectives: This study aims to understand how the integration of RAS platforms impacts the interactions and outcomes of interactions between surgical team members to explore the barriers from three aspects critical to facilitating Robotic-assisted-surgery (RAS) adoption: the human-robotic interaction, built environment, and RAS training. Future …

Opioid Overdose Epidemic Modeling, Chelsea Spence

All Dissertations

The opioid overdose crisis in the United States has led to thousands of lost lives and thousands more people struggling with opioid dependence. Disease modeling allows researchers to examine the course that the disease may take and to investigate policies to determine the effects they may have. Disease models can be used to model non-communicable diseases and have been used to study opioid use disorder. Many types of disease models exist with their own inherent benefits and drawbacks.

In this dissertation, we provide a scoping review of the disease models that have been used to study the opioid overdose epidemic. …

An Emergency Response System To Assist The Movement Of Vehicles During Emergency Operations In Urban Transportation Networks, Jamal Nahofti Kohneh

All Dissertations

Emergency responders need to arrive at the emergency scene as soon as possible, but operating vehicles under emergency conditions can pose a risk to both the responders and other road users, potentially resulting in crashes or delays in emergency operations. In this research, an emergency response system is proposed to assist emergency and non-emergency response vehicles (ERVs and non-ERVs) during emergency operations in a connected vehicle environment. This system collects the information from connected ERVs and non-ERVs, utilizes this information as inputs in the proposed models, and sends instruction messages back to vehicles. The proposed models provide the fastest ERV …

Modeling Of Multi-Period Disaster Logistics Planning In The State Of South Carolina, Emma Simon

All Theses

South Carolina is one of the most vulnerable states in the United States to the impact of hurricanes. Currently, when threatened with a natural disaster such as a hurricane, the state government makes many vital decisions based on knowledge and experience. In this study, the distribution of disaster relief commodities to meet immediate needs is analyzed through two models for the case of South Carolina to generate an optimal logistics strategy that considers the social vulnerability of affected populations. The first model is a multi-objective pre-disaster logistics model that uses a four-index formulation for the multiple trip vehicle routing problem. …

Application Of An Information Gain Model In A Motor Learning Task: An Application In A Laparoscopic Surgical Skills Task, Matthew Ball

All Theses

Psychomotor skills are comprised of physical movements and mental adaptations of movements to complete a task, generally using complex tools or components. Laparoscopic surgery training tasks are a prime example of tasks requiring psychomotor skills due to their demand for both fine hand movements and constant mental adaptation to the changing environment of the human body. A typical evaluation of these skills can be accomplished using learning curves, a graphical representation of skill growth in which a performance metric is plotted over a time experience metric. Previously, in the literature, several learning curves have been generated from the performance within …

A Transdisicplinary, Survivor-Centered Approach For Creating A System Dynamics Model Of Closed-Buyer Sex Trafficking Networks, Kemonte Yow

All Theses

One of the largest drivers of sex trafficking operations is the demand for commercial sex. To date, research from a quantitative side typically focuses on understanding how to best identify and remove victims from their trafficking situation and then support their healing and recovery. This may be because this is where data exists (in limited forms) to support quantitative modeling. This thesis broadens that scope to understand how demand for commercial sex impacts trafficking operations. In particular, this research implemented a transdisciplinary, survivor-centered approach to build a system dynamics model of a closed-buyer sex trafficking network, which is a network …

Depression And Anxiety: Investigating The Impacts Of Scheduling On The Mental Health Of Healthcare Workers During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Christofer Gonzaga

All Theses

Depression is a growing problem in the United States and has ballooned into a globally recognized mental health issue that affects shift workers in various fields (Lee et al., 2017). Rates of depression and anxiety have been shown to be substantially increasing and the COVID-19 pandemic amplified this prevalence of depression and anxiety. In the United States, the prevalence of depression symptoms was more than 3- fold higher during COVID-19 compared to before the pandemic (Ettman et al., 2020). The delivery of healthcare services is an ongoing and dynamic process, requiring clinicians to work in various shifts to ensure the …